Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.

We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.

To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

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List of the most influential people

#30601

Thomas B. Warren

#30613

Overall Influence

1920 - 2000 (80 years)

Thomas Bratton Warren was an American professor of philosophy of religion and apologetics at the Harding School of Theology in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, and was an important philosopher and theologian in the Churches of Christ during the latter half of the twentieth century.

#30602

Donald Othmer

#30614

Overall Influence

1904 - 1995 (91 years)

Donald Frederick Othmer was an American professor of chemical engineering, an inventor, multi-millionaire and philanthropist, whose most famous work is the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology, which is a major reference work in chemistry.

#30603

Fred Couples

#30615

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Frederick Steven Couples is an American professional golfer who has competed on the PGA Tour and the PGA Tour Champions. A former World No. 1, he has won 64 professional tournaments, most notably the Masters Tournament and the Players Championship in 1984 Couples became the oldest person to make the cut in the Masters Tournament history during the Tournament's 87th edition at 63 years, six months, and five days.

#30604

Udo Weilacher

#30616

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Dr. Udo Weilacher is a German landscape architect, author and Professor for Landscape Architecture. Biography Udo Weilacher was educated as a gardener in 1984. He studied landscape architecture at the Technical University of Munich-Weihenstephan and at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona between 1986 and 1993. At the Technical University of Munich he received his diploma from the German landscape architect and professor Peter Latz. At the University of Karlsruhe and the ETH Zürich where he worked as a scientific assistant and a lecturer until 2002, it was the renowned Swiss landscape architect Dieter Kienast, who influenced Weilacher in his practical and theoretical work.

#30605

Kurt Deketelaere

#30617

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Kurt Deketelaere is a Belgian academic and president of the League of European Research Universities . He is a professor of law in environmental law at the KU Leuven. External links Official website Kurt DeketelaereOfficial website LERU

#30606

Mark Daly

#30618

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Mark Joseph Daly is Director of the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine at the University of Helsinki, a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Chief of the Analytic and Translational Genetic Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In the early days of the Human Genome Project, Daly helped develop the genetic model by which linkage disequilibrium could be used to map the haplotype structure of the human genome. In addition, he developed statistical methods to find associations between genes and disorders such as Crohn's di...

#30607

Lara Fabian

#30619

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

Lara Sophie Katy Crokaert , better known as Lara Fabian, is a Belgian-Canadian pop singer and songwriter. She has sold over 20 million records worldwide as of 2021 and is one of the best-selling Belgian artists of all time.

#30608

Ronald Fedkiw

#30620

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Ronald Paul "Ron" Fedkiw is a full professor in the Stanford University department of computer science and a leading researcher in the field of computer graphics, focusing on topics relating to physically based simulation of natural phenomena and machine learning. His techniques have been employed in many motion pictures. He has earned recognition at the 80th Academy Awards and the 87th Academy Awards as well as from the National Academy of Sciences.

#30609

John Figueroa

#30621

Overall Influence

1920 - 1999 (79 years)

John Joseph Maria Figueroa was a Jamaican poet and educator. He played a significant role in the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature both as a poet and an anthologist. He contributed to the development of the University College of the West Indies as an early member of staff, and had a parallel career as a broadcaster, working for various media organizations including the BBC. He also taught in Jamaica, Britain, the United States, Nigeria and Puerto Rico.

#30610

Sarah Mkhonza

#30622

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Sarah Mkhonza is a Swazi writer, educator and women's rights activist living in the United States. Mkhonza received a PhD from Michigan State University. She worked as a journalist for the Times of Swaziland and The Swazi Observer and taught English and Linguistics at the University of Swaziland. Because her writing was critical of the authorities in Swaziland, she was ordered to stop writing. Subsequent threats and assaults led her to seek political asylum in the United States in 2005.

#30611

Toshio Kuroda

#30623

Overall Influence

1926 - 1993 (67 years)

Toshio Kuroda was a Japanese academic, historian and university professor. A specialist in medieval Japanese history and in the history of Japanese thought, he greatly influenced Japanese historiography with several innovative and controversial theories. His ideas were the opposite of what mainstream academics at the time believed, and for this reason his name is often at the center of controversies. His work has been called "seminal", "epochal" and "revolutionary".

#30612

Renée Mauborgne

#30624

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Renée Mauborgne is an American economist and business theorist. She is a professor of strategy at INSEAD, a business school based in France. Mauborgne is also the co-director of the Fontainebleau-based INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. She is known as co-author of the 2005 book Blue Ocean Strategy.

#30613

Douglas Baird

#30625

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Douglas Gordon Baird is an American legal scholar, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor and a former dean of the University of Chicago Law School. He joined the faculty in 1980 and served as the dean from 1994 to 1999. He is a leader in the field of bankruptcy law.

#30614

Will Arnett

#30626

Overall Influence

1970 - Present (56 years)

William Emerson Arnett is a Canadian-American actor and comedian. In television, Arnett played Gob Bluth in the Fox/Netflix series Arrested Development and as the titular character in the Netflix series BoJack Horseman . He has appeared in films such as Let's Go to Prison , Blades of Glory , Semi-Pro , G-Force , Jonah Hex , Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows , and Show Dogs .

#30615

Dizzee Rascal

#30627

Overall Influence

1984 - Present (42 years)

Dylan Kwabena Mills , known professionally as Dizzee Rascal, is a British MC and rapper. A pioneer of grime music, his work has also incorporated elements of UK garage, bassline, British hip hop, and R&B.

#30616

Benny Hill

#30628

Overall Influence

1924 - 1992 (68 years)

Alfred Hawthorne "Benny" Hill was an English comedian, actor, singer and writer. He is remembered for his television programme The Benny Hill Show, an amalgam of slapstick, burlesque and double entendre in a format that included live comedy and filmed segments, with Hill at the focus of almost every segment.

#30617

Allyson Pollock

#30629

Overall Influence

Allyson Pollock is a consultant in public health medicine and was the Director of the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University. She is an academic who is known for her research into, and opposition to, part privatisation of the UK National Health Service via the Private Finance Initiative and other mechanisms.

#30618

Brian Henderson-Sellers

#30630

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Brian Henderson-Sellers is an English computer scientist residing in Sydney, Australia, and Professor of Information Systems at the University of Technology Sydney. He is also Director of the Centre for Object Technology and Applications at University of Technology Sydney.

#30619

Sivaji Ganesan

#30631

Overall Influence

1928 - 2001 (73 years)

Villupuram Chinnaiya Manrayar Ganesamoorthy, better known by his stage name Sivaji Ganesan, was an Indian actor and producer. He was active in Tamil cinema during the latter half of the 20th century. Sivaji Ganesan is acknowledged as one of the greatest Indian actors of all time and among the most imitated one by other actors. He was known for his versatility and the variety of roles he depicted on screen, which gave him also the Tamil nickname Nadigar Thilagam . In a career that spanned close to five decades, he had acted in 288 films in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi. Sivaji Ga...

#30620

Olivier Clément

#30632

Overall Influence

1921 - 2009 (88 years)

Olivier-Maurice Clément was a French Eastern Orthodox theologian who taught at St. Sergius Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris, France. He actively promoted the reunification of Christians , dialogue between Christians and people of other beliefs, and the engagement of Christian thinkers with modern thought and society.

#30621

Ioannis Kakridis

#30633

Overall Influence

1901 - 1992 (91 years)

Ioannis Kakridis was a Greek classical scholar and was one of the leading scholars of Homeric Poetry in the twentieth century. He was born in Athens in 1901 and received his PhD at the University of Athens. He went on to become a professor at the universities of Athens, Thessaloniki, Tübingen, Stockholm, Lund and Uppsala. Kakridis was a Homer scholar and one of the most important classicists of twentieth-century Greece. He was also an early and staunch advocate of the adoption of the monotonic system in the Greek language. In 1941, he was denounced by the faculty of the University of Athens ...

#30622

Autar Kaw

#30634

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Autar Kaw is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of South Florida. In 2012, he won the U.S Professor of the Year award from the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Kaw's main scholarly interests are in education research methods, open courseware development, flipped and adaptive learning, and the state and future of higher education.

#30623

Nalini Balbir

#30635

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Nalini Balbir is a French Indologist who lives in Paris. She is a scholar of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. She was previously a student of Indologist Colette Caillat. She is known for her work on the publication of the Catalogue of the Jain Manuscripts of the British Library published by the Institute of Jainology.

#30624

Israel Hanukoglu

#30636

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Israel Hanukoglu is a Turkish-born Israeli scientist. He is a full professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Ariel University and former science and technology adviser to the prime minister of Israel . He is founder of Israel Science and Technology Directory.

#30625

Abigail Sellen

#30637

Overall Influence

Abigail Jane Sellen is a Canadian cognitive scientist, industrial engineer, and computer scientist who works for Microsoft Research in Cambridge. She is also an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham and University College London.

#30626

John Friedlander

John Friedlander

#30638

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

John Friedlander is a Canadian mathematician specializing in analytic number theory. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1965, an M.A. from the University of Waterloo in 1966, and a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1972. He was a lecturer at M.I.T. in 1974–76, and has been on the faculty of the University of Toronto since 1977, where he served as Chair during 1987–91. He has also spent several years at the Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to his individual work, he has been notable for his collaborations with other well-known number theorists, including...

#30627

Martin Lawrence

Martin Lawrence

#30639

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Martin Fitzgerald Lawrence is an American actor and comedian. He came to fame during the 1990s, establishing a Hollywood career as a leading actor. He got his start playing Maurice Warfield in What's Happening Now!! . He was a leading actor in the Fox television sitcom Martin, the Bad Boys franchise, and House Party, Boomerang, A Thin Line Between Love and Hate, Nothing to Lose, Life, Blue Streak, Big Momma's House, Black Knight, Open Season, and Wild Hogs.

#30628

Sergi Bruguera

#30640

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Sergi Bruguera i Torner is a former professional tennis player from Spain. He won consecutive men's singles titles at the French Open in 1993 and 1994, a silver medal at the 1996 Olympic Games in men's singles and reached a career-high ranking of No. 3 in August 1994.

#30629

Laura DeNardis

#30641

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Laura DeNardis is an American author and a scholar of Internet governance and technical infrastructure. She is the Professor and Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics, and Society at Georgetown University. DeNardis is an affiliated Fellow of the Yale Information Society Project at Yale Law School and served as its executive director from 2008 to 2011. She previously served as a Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the Director of Research for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. With a background in information technology engineering and a doctorate i...

#30630

Deborah Birx

#30642

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Deborah Leah Birx is an American physician and diplomat who served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under President Donald Trump from 2020 to 2021. Birx specializes in HIV/AIDS immunology, vaccine research, and global health. Starting in 2014, she oversaw the implementation of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program to support HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs in 65 countries. From 2014-2020, Birx was the United States global AIDS coordinator for presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump and served as the United States special representative for global health diplomacy between 2015 and 2021.

#30631

Peter Mazur

#30643

Overall Influence

1922 - 2001 (79 years)

Peter Mazur was an Austrian-born, Dutch physicist and one of the founders of the field of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. He is the father of Harvard University physics professor Eric Mazur. Family Peter Mazur was born on 11 December 1922 in Vienna, Austria. His father, Karl Georg Mazur, a businessman, and mother, Anna Zula Lecker, frequently moved during Mazur's youth. In 1931 the family left for Berlin, where Mazur attended the Französisches Gymnasium. Two years later the family left Germany to escape the growing threat of National Socialism. After spending one year in Switzerland they moved to Paris where Mazur attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly.

#30632

Marilyn Waring

#30644

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Dame Marilyn Joy Waring is a New Zealand public policy scholar, international development consultant, former politician, environmentalist, feminist and a principal founder of feminist economics. In 1975, aged 23, she became New Zealand's youngest member of parliament for the liberal-conservative New Zealand National Party. As a member of parliament she chaired the Public Expenditure Committee. Her support of the opposition Labour Party's proposed nuclear-free New Zealand policy was instrumental in precipitating the 1984 New Zealand general election, and she left parliament in 1984.

#30633

John Demjanjuk

#30645

Overall Influence

1920 - 2012 (92 years)

John Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-American who served as a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg. Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as "Ivan the Terrible", a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. In 1993 the verdict was overturned. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany as an accessory to the 28,060 murders that occurred during his service at Sobibor.

#30634

Alexander King

#30646

Overall Influence

1909 - 2007 (98 years)

Alexander King was a British chemist and pioneer of the sustainable development movement who co-founded the Club of Rome in 1968 with the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei. The Club was one of the first institutions to voice concerns about the impact on the environment of unprecedented economic growth in the 20th century. "Peccei and King were lonely prophets at a time of overwhelming optimism," who did much to push environmental issues on to the political agenda. At the time of the Club's founding, King was Director-General for Scientific Affairs at the Paris-based Organisation for Econo...

#30635

George Blanda

#30647

Overall Influence

1927 - 2010 (83 years)

George Frederick Blanda was an American professional football player who was a placekicker and quarterback in the American Football League and National Football League . Blanda played 26 seasons of professional football, the most in the sports history, and had scored more points than anyone in history at the time of his retirement.

#30636

Gene Savoy

#30648

Overall Influence

1927 - 2007 (80 years)

Douglas Eugene "Gene" Savoy was an American explorer, author, religious leader, and theologian. He served as Head Bishop of the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent from 1971 until his death. Rising to prominence as one of the premier explorers of Peru in the 1960s, he is best known for his claims to have discovered more than 40 lost cities in Peru and is credited with bringing to light a number of Peru’s most important archeological sites, including Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas during the Spanish conquest, and Gran Pajaten, which he named but did not di...

#30637

Davey Boy Smith

Davey Boy Smith

#30649

Overall Influence

1962 - 2002 (40 years)

David Smith was an English professional wrestler best known for his appearances in the United States with the World Wrestling Federation under the ring names Davey Boy Smith and The British Bulldog.

#30638

Kiichi Miyazawa

#30650

Overall Influence

1919 - 2007 (88 years)

Kiichi Miyazawa was a Japanese politician who served as Prime Minister of Japan from 1991 to 1993. He was a member of the National Diet of Japan for over 50 years. Early life and education Miyazawa was born into a wealthy, politically active family in Fukuyama, Hiroshima, on 8 October 1919, as the eldest son of politician Yutaka Miyazawa and his wife Koto. His father was a member of the Diet, and his mother was the daughter of politician Ogawa Heikichi, who served as Minister of Justice and Minister of Railways. Following the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, Miyazawa lived at his grandfather Ogawa Heikichi's villa Kasuian in Hiratsuka.

#30639

Terje Tvedt

#30651

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Terje Tvedt is a Norwegian academic, author and documentary film maker. Tvedt is presently a professor at the Department of Geography, University of Bergen, and Professor in Global History, University of Oslo, Norway. He has previously been a professor of political science and development studies.

#30640

Ronald J. Rychlak

#30652

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Ronald J. Rychlak is an American lawyer, jurist, author and political commentator. He is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law and is holder of the Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law and Government. He is known for his published works, career as an attorney, and writings on the role of Pope Pius XII in World War II.

#30641

F. Whitten Peters

F. Whitten Peters

#30653

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Frederick Whitten Peters is a District of Columbia lawyer and senior level public official. His law practice specializes in civil and criminal litigation including contract fraud, antitrust, tax and security cases. He has served in several key positions within the U.S. federal government, including as Secretary of the Air Force.

#30642

Lee Trevino

#30654

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Lee Buck Trevino is an American retired professional golfer who is regarded as one of the greatest players in golf history. He was inducted to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1981. Trevino won six major championships and 29 PGA Tour events over the course of his career. He is one of only four players to twice win the U.S. Open, The Open Championship and the PGA Championship. The Masters Tournament was the only major that eluded him. He is an icon for Mexican Americans, and is often referred to as "The Merry Mex" and "Supermex," both affectionate nicknames given to him by other golfers.

#30643

Fred Wendorf

#30655

Overall Influence

1924 - 2015 (91 years)

Denver Fred Wendorf was an American archaeologist known primarily for his groundbreaking research in northeast Africa. He also founded the Fort Burgwin Research Center and Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University, where he was Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory. He won numerous awards throughout his career and was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

#30644

Kimiko Hahn

#30656

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her works frequently deal with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities.

#30645

Donald E. Brownlee

#30657

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Donald Eugene Brownlee is a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington at Seattle and the principal investigator for NASA's Stardust mission. In 2000, along with his co-author Peter Ward, he co-originated the term Rare Earth, in reference to the possible scarcity of life elsewhere in the universe. His primary research interests include astrobiology, comets, and cosmic dust. He was born in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#30646

Lea Salonga

#30658

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Maria Lea Carmen Imutan Salonga , known professionally as Lea Salonga, is a Filipina singer, actress, producer, and columnist. Dubbed the "Pride of the Philippines", she is best known for her roles in musical theatre, for supplying the singing voices of two Disney Princesses , and as a recording artist and television performer. Throughout her career, she has achieved numerous accolades and honors, becoming an internationally recognized figure in music and entertainment.

#30647

Peter Beilharz

#30659

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist. He is professor of critical theory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC. Previously he was professor of sociology and remains Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne . He is adjunct professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Beilharz is founding editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven published by Sage.

#30648

Vladimir Voevodin

Vladimir Voevodin

#30660

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Vladimir Voevodin is a computer scientist, professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics , Deputy Director of MSU Research Computing Center, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor, Dr.Sc.

#30649

Lou Thesz

#30661

Overall Influence

1916 - 2002 (86 years)

Aloysius Martin Thesz , known by the ring name Lou Thesz, was an American professional wrestler. Considered to be one of the last true shooters in professional wrestling and described as the "quintessential athlete" and a "polished warrior who could break a man in two if pushed the wrong way", Thesz is widely regarded as one of the greatest wrestlers of all time and the single greatest wrestling world champion in history, and probably the last globally accepted world champion.

#30650

Kei Nakazawa

#30662

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Kei Nakazawa is the professional name of Emiko Honda, a Japanese writer and professor. Nakazawa has won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers and the Noma Literary New Face Prize, and two of her novels have been adapted for film. Since 2005 she has been a professor of literature at Hosei University.

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